Thursday, November 29, 2007

Putting the girls to the test.

The temperature got up to 60 today so my mentor came over and we went inside again. Let me mention the the overall goal is to get the bees off of his comb and onto my frames/comb. When we opened the hive the frames were located as shown below.

The darker frames are the ones that we transferred over from my mentor's Nuc. Note in this picture the two lighter frames in between the darker frames. These are the frames that the bees are drawing comb on. At the end of the day we put these two lighter frames in the middle and moved the two middle frames outside of them. The hope is that the bees will move the main brood area to these two newly formed comb. That means the queen will have to begin laying in the new comb. At this point all that is in the new comb is honey and pollen - we'll see!To complete the story, the outer two dark frames were removed from the bottom hive. One was completely taken out, the other was put up in the feeder box. Again, the hope is that the bees will move from this frames/comb down to the main hive and get busy on the new comb.

Here is a closeup the bees down in the brood area.

Below is a picture of the hive as we were moving the frames around. You can see that we have moved the two dark frames in the center apart and are placing the newly drawn combs into the center.

Also, we had to use the smoker today. I don't know if it was the chillier weather or what, but the girls were feisty!

Dictionary

Brood Box - where the brood (the eggs, larva and young bees) are raised. Normally the bottom most box.

Checkerboarding - Interspersing empty brood comb (or even foundation) into the brood area. This is done to give the queen more room to raise brood and hopefully not swarm.

Entrance Reducer - Just a wooden stick made to fit in the entrance and make the entrance smaller. This will help keep in heat and allow the bees to guard the entrance better against bees that do not belong to the hive (robber bees).

Orientation Flight - The first trip out of the hive by young bees. They try to understand their location so they can make it back home. Also occurs when the hive is moved.